My Solution To Solutions

Forum Help Forum Features
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Hello!

I am here to talk about something we all know and love on the roblox developer forum: solutions!

Solutions are a fantastic way to immediately present the solution to a problem which was posted to the roblox developer forum. Its a great way to show off how handy and knowledgeable you can be, and to look back and reflect on all the wonderful times you were able to help someone else!

Except they aren’t always like this.

On multiple occasions, I have come across profiles, and thought “wow, this guy is going to be AMAZINGLY handy, he has 20 solutions, and has only been here for 2 months?”; only to discover that this person has handed themselves the solution to most of the questions they have asked others.

My best example of this was this topic (Server refusing to move welded parts, help needed), where a user asked what was going on with their tweening. They were stuck, and didn’t know why one part wouldn’t move. Based on the question: “Server refusing to move welded parts, help needed”, I figured I knew the solution almost immediately.

I had come across this exact problem before, and knew the user was tweening position directly instead of using a CFrame. I communicated this to them, and thought awesome! Another solution to add to the bank, it is genuinely really fun being able to help!

But they had a few more questions,
and a few more…
and then we weren’t even really on topic anymore.

The user I was helping basically started pushing the conversation to getting a direct, programmed solution to their problem. (which you are not supposed to do for people on here (Guidelines on asking for help and collaboration in this forum))

I tried to politely let them know, hey, I can’t do everything for you, but I have given you the solution to the question you asked me, so ideally you mark me as a solution and continue on creating and inspiring!

But the response I received was… weird.

You can look in the thread linked, however my summary of what they said is this “Sorry if you feel underappreciated, I only post the actual full solution to the specific problem.”

I genuinely provided the solution to the question which was initially asked, the user admits this themselves, stating that I had cleared up their confusion. Great! But they still marked themselves as the solution.

In many cases, solutions are unfortunately used to leverage users into providing a fully programmed and specific solution for the OP. I believe that is what was happening in this case as well, although I may be wrong, I was definitely feeling pressure to try and provide that so as to not feel like I had wasted my time.

So, here is the question:

Is it more inconvenient to not be able to mark yourself as a solution, or is more inconvenient for users to be leveraging solutions and harming the purpose of the general utility of developer forum?

My thoughts:

I believe you should not be able to mark yourself as the solution.

I can understand that some OP’s genuinely find the solution to their own problem (the general, useful one) and that it would be inconvenient for some users to have to occasionally scroll through some specific threads.

I want you to consider though, in this post, would you be using the lerp function provided? or would you be using the information about having to use CFrames when tweening welded parts if you want physics simulation to still happen?

If your answer is the second one, you will waste more time reading the overtly specific solution than you would reading the more applicable one. Plus, you would have to scroll to the more applicable one most likely anyway.

However, I believe strongly that it is worse for users to be able to leverage solutions against each other. I believe not being able to mark yourself as the solution encourages people such as my provided example to mark the more useful solution for the sake of others, rather than their personal extremely specific use case.

The developer forum has been so incredibly helpful to me when users provide strong, general solutions. I sincerely thank all users who stand their ground on not providing overtly specific solutions, and I hope this inspires some good thinking and collaborating to understand what we want from the Roblox Developer Forum.

Sincerely,

Ethanaut

Note:
This is a reupload of an old topic that got taken down due to incorrect categorization. This is a request to have self solutions removed, or to just make solution guidelines more strict. Also the problem with the provided example in the self solutions was that the question asked was answered, and the solution marked was for the specific use case of that answer instead of the answer.

Also I know that these exist elsewhere but I think its important to keep bringing it to light.

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Well sometimes the user finds the solution themselves so making yourself the solution is needed in that case

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I disagree. Solutions are meant to highlight the solution to a problem, that’s their sole and only purpose. They’re not meant to be used as a stat mark. Suggesting that users shouldn’t be able to self-mark solutions because someone may try to inflate their stats ignores the purpose of solutions.

What if a user ends up finding a solution to their question? Someone else may also have had the same problem and stumbled across the post on Google. But since the OP can’t mark their own solution, they’re forced to scroll all the way down a bunch of replies trying to find it. Is that inconvenience something we want as a feature?

I don’t care if a user has 1 solution or 200 solutions on their profile, that just shows that they frequent Help and Feedback a lot. Doesn’t really say much about their “reputation”. How I gauge reputation is how I’ve interacted with people on the forum. There are dozens of people here I deem reputable despite never checking their solution stats ever. A LOT of the time, these people have extremely low solution counts as well, as they frequent Development Discussion or Announcements more.

I think you should not take stats too seriously. Bad actors happen, but that shouldn’t be the reason something useful is removed. If someone abuses solutions, flag the post and have a moderator deal with it. I personally think the solution stat should be removed from the profile.

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I agree that solutions shouldn’t be really looked at as a stat mark but to be totally honest they are looked at that way in from my perspective enough cases. (note that I do not look at them as a status symbol, I like to reflect on them more like collectibles Lol).

If a user finds a solution to their question, that would be inconvenient. My question is whether it is more inconvenient to not be able to mark yourself as solution, or if it is more convenient to let people treat it like a status thing and mark themselves at every opportunity they get, which causes even more scrolling as mentioned before.

A lot of people care about solutions. I care that they are used properly, but others care that they have a lot of them. Sometimes, as in the case provided, they care more to convenience their own scrolling time than the people who may view the post in the future.

Also that honestly is a pretty good suggestion, but it doesn’t also eliminate cases where a person is only thinking about themselves, and marks their post as the solution when its over specific and not related to the question. This causes everyone else to have to scroll more adding to the concern you mentioned.

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Is it more inconvenient to remove that case, or to keep that case?

My belief is that it is more inconvenient to keep that case, as many people mark themselves incorrectly. I believe more so than correctly.

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I feel you may be over-exaggerating how many are abusing self-solutions. Most posts I see are either correctly marked with solutions, or not marked at all. Most users have good intentions. Removing a feature that can be extremely useful because a few people exploit it will hurt more than it helps.

Yes, it does suck when people inflate their own stats, but it doesn’t seem to be enough of a problem to warrant such action. Even if hypothetically most people abused solutions, I would much rather prefer to see enforcement of proper usage rather than total removal. It hurts those who use the forum for its intended purpose. Bending the rules to accommodate for bad actors should only happen when it’s absolutely necessary.

Though, enough of the ethics. I don’t even think the DevForum can remove the ability to self-solve. The entire solution feature isn’t even made by Roblox, it’s a plugin from Discourse (the backend that this forum uses), meaning that you’d have to ask that plugin creator to include such a feature. Don’t think Roblox has the ability to exit other people’s plugins.

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I honestly did not think to actually collect data on solution usages. Thinking about it I could be experiencing a cognitive biased because of negative experiences. I still believe enough people misuse it that it would hurt less than help to keep, considering how few people genuinely solve their own problem. (but I will get data on it if it concerns me more going forward).

I agree that better reinforcement would be a better first step, but how do you reinforce something like this effectively? Every moderator would have to be strongly versed in the software aspects of roblox to combat this issue practically.

Also, I am asking the developer forum because we all are the people impacted by it, and I believe this message may encourage people to reach out to the plugin creator. I assume one person is not going to change the minds of the plugin creators for our specific use case. But if enough people believe it is worthwhile, a group may come together and create change.

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I feel like a better (and equally heavy-handed) approach to this is to just remove the public-facing solutions stat. No more incentive to game the system!

If you have an issue with someone, take them up with DevForum moderation. They’re typically pretty good about that sort of thing.

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This is Roblox. There’s no such thing as proper rule enforcement, only removals of things that get annoying.

Besides, despite the (thankfully shrinking) number of people on here solely just to watch their profile numbers go up, it’s never been against the rules to not have good intentions when using the devforum

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Pretty sure I replied to something like this before…

anyway, as mentioned above, solutions are meant to show a solution. That’s it. If a solution doesn’t show a solution I can see it being forcefully changed, but even the enforcement of that is iffy, because how do you know if that really worked for them or not?

The current system is absolutely fine as is.

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I had seen your reply to the first time this was posted. I stated earlier that enforcement would be iffy as moderation would become very detail oriented and time consuming. I agree a solution should show a solution, that is this post means to say I wonder if it could be done more accurately. I am also wondering how many people agree, disagree or what ideas they have.

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Why do you feel like it’s a bad thing to care about oneself solution count? I sure don’t care about marking myself as the solution, but care about how helpful I was to other people.

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I disagree. If the poster found the solution to their own post, they should be able to mark it as so. This not only tells other people that the post is solved and does not require more input, but also allows for people who come across the same problem later on to quickly access the fix.

IMO, self-solutions should just not count towards the solutions stat.

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This is something I’ve been wondering.

The solution count has a lot of potential to demonstrate how active and helpful a person is, and it is kind of undermined by a persons ability to self solution. (Or just the fact that it is counted).

I’m wondering why sometimes others view this potential as bad. If someone has a high solution count, are they not almost guaranteed to be a very helpful person?

In our case they most definitely are not guaranteed due to a persons ability to mess with that statistic.

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That is true, there will always be a workaround.

Unless there’s nothing to work around dx

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I disagree with your stance. Solutions exist on the forums to let anybody know what the solution to the problem is, not about who did it or to boast about it.

Sometimes the OP got the solution himself, and he marks it to himself.

Now if anyone marks his own comment as the solution to boast, that is his own problem and you shouldn’t care or worry about that. Even if his comment wasn’t the right solution, that is not a huge problem.